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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Bug or Feature - Round Six

We're back again with another round of "Bug or Feature?" highlighting a particular behavior in one or more browsers, that, well, could be a Bug, or it could be a Feature... we'll open up the comments for your vote and opinion.

Alright, what's today's "Bug or Feature"?

Synopsis:
Everyone knows that form elements [button|input|select|textarea] can be disabled to stop users interacting with them and to ensure they are not "successful controls" when a form is submitted.

So... what happens if you disable non form elements?

In most browsers... Just like you'd expect... absolutely nothing because it isn't supported.

However in IE there is a different behavior.

In IE when you set the disabled flag on an element it "kinda-sorta" disables all the child elements.

1 comment:

I'd argue a 'feature' when used on a form element, and a bug on anything else. I could totally see the use of disabling an entire form, and to do that through a single attribute would not only be convenient, but more importantly would make sense semantically.

As a side note, the psudo-disable you mention is interesting. You can edit text, but not click form elements. Buggy behavior, but I could understand the benefit.

Recent Updates

Feb. 7,2009 - Added a new Tag called Broken By Design. It is applied to all reported bugs that the browser vendor has indicated that they have no intention of fixing this bug any time soon and is therefore broken "By Design".

Feb. 7,2009 - Updated as many bug reports as possible for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to reflect the status of IE8 RC1 since according to the IE Blog the RTM release is coming soon. If you want to know, click to see what has been fixed?